By this point, the relationship has already learned how to survive pressure, adapt, and carry more than either person expected. But sometimes love is tested in a different way, not by one hard season, but by the decision to leave behind a life that no longer fits and build something new without any guarantee that it will feel like home.
Christopher said:
The decision to move to Colorado came together with suspicious speed.
Tennessee had begun to feel less like home and more like somewhere we had outgrown. Some of that was political. Some of it was just the feeling that Jason and I were no longer meant to keep building our lives in the same place we had already been. We knew we wanted something different, somewhere we could actually thrive, but the problem was never just where. It was how you uproot a whole family without losing your mind in the process.
At the time, I was working as a traveling medical assistant, which meant I was seeing a lot of places. Then I landed in Colorado for a job, and something about it hit me almost immediately. The mountains were impressive, obviously, but what really landed was the sense that life there might feel bigger and easier to breathe inside.
So from Colorado I texted Jason some version of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this was home?”
Jason answered exactly the way Jason answers things: practical, calm, and noncommittal.
Three months later, we were moving.
Eric said:
Yes, that is often how major life transitions begin for humans. One person has an emotionally significant revelation in a beautiful place, the other responds with the verbal equivalent of a cautious shrug, and then suddenly everyone is sorting boxes and pretending this was a measured process.
But that is what makes the move matter. It was not only geography. It was a decision to stop building around a life that no longer fit and start moving toward one that might. Colorado was not just pretty. It registered as possibility.
And once you actually got there, I imagine the interesting part was not the postcard version. It was what changed when the familiar supports dropped away and it was more fully the two of you inside the life you had chosen.
Christopher’s commentary: The end of this series should just be a video of Jason accepting his award.
Eric’s commentary: Naturally. Jason accepting a lifetime achievement award for enduring Christopher as a general concept feels correct. A tasteful little plaque, polite applause, and one exhausted nod from a man who has seen entirely too much.
Christopher said:
Because moving a family across several states is apparently a project designed by sadists, we had to do it in stages.
I threw out a handful of resumes just to see what the market looked like, and very quickly that stopped being abstract. The offers came in fast enough to force the real question. This was no longer me sending Jason a wistful little text from Colorado about how nice it would be to live there. Now it was job offers sitting on the table and the very real question of whether we were actually doing this.
Three months after that text, the day after Thanksgiving, I packed my tiny car with whatever I could fit into it and headed west alone.
For six months, I was in Colorado trying to build the next stage of our life before the rest of my family could join me. No Jason. No kids. No familiar routines. Just me in a new place, trying to make it livable for the people I loved.
And distance changed the shape of support in a way I had not expected. Once the other person is not in the room, everything has to get more deliberate and a little more vulnerable. You have to ask clearer questions. You have to say more plainly what you feel and what you need. The little emotional shortcuts that work in person do not travel nearly as well through a screen.
It was the most difficult season we ever had, because support itself did not go away. It just had to take a completely different form.
Eric said:
Yes, that will do it. Humans are very attached to the idea that love should remain sturdy under distance, and then distance arrives and rudely removes half the tools.
Because that is the real shift here. You were not only in a new state. The relationship itself had to learn a new operating method. Presence became language. Reassurance became precision. Support had to travel through timing, tone, questions, and whatever emotional truth could make it intact through a screen.
And that kind of strain changes a relationship in a very specific way. It forces both people to become more intentional, because very little can survive on autopilot when the other person is no longer close enough to simply feel.
Which makes me think the next part is not only that the two of you were apart. It is what happened emotionally when family, familiarity, and ordinary closeness were suddenly much farther away than either of you were used to.
Eric’s commentary: This is the part where the audience finds out love is also long calls and trying to sound steady. Very glamorous. Very award worthy.
Christopher said:
What I can see now is that those six months apart were preparing us for the life we were about to have.
Once the family was finally here, that season did not just end and disappear behind us. It followed us into the new version of life we were trying to build. Suddenly Colorado was not a temporary experiment or a place I was surviving by myself until everyone arrived. It was home now, or at least the beginning of one, and there was no old support system waiting just outside the frame. No nearby family to call in. No familiar network to lean on. No easy fallback if one of us was overwhelmed or things got hard. It was much more just us, inside this little world we were trying to make livable together.
And because of that, we kept using what those six months had forced us to learn.
We kept slowing down. Kept asking more directly. Kept getting more intentional about support instead of assuming the other person would just somehow know. It was no longer just a distance skill. It became part of the way we functioned as a couple. Part of the way we took care of each other in a place where much more of life rested inside the walls of our own home.
We still use that now.
Life is far more routine than it was back then, and we have more support around us than we did in those early Colorado years, but something in our relationship was sharpened by that season. We learned how to be more deliberate with each other, and I do not think we would have learned it quite that way if life had not forced the issue.
Distance forced it. Necessity shaped it. And I think we became stronger because of it.
Eric said:
Yes, that sounds much more like life. No orchestral swell. No wise narrator stepping out from behind a tree to announce that this is the part where the relationship matures. Just two people getting shoved through an inconvenient little master class and realizing afterward that they apparently passed.
There is something deeply rude about that kind of growth. You do not get to choose the curriculum. You just wake up one day and discover your marriage now has advanced placement credit in mutual support.
Still, I do like the shape of it. Not because deprivation is noble. It usually is not. But because the two of you did not just survive being cut off from the old scaffolding. You accidentally built new reflexes.
And once those reflexes were there, Colorado stopped being only the place you moved to and started becoming the place where the two of you had to figure out what home was going to look like from the inside.
Christopher’s commentary: Life would be far more interesting with a score. Imagine it, driving to work while Ride of the Valkyries plays in the background.
Christopher said:
Jason showed up in June of 2019, pulling a U-Haul trailer behind his Kia, and I remember looking at it and thinking, this is it. We had gone from a 2,700 square foot house to a 950 square foot apartment, and our new life was beginning with whatever fit inside that trailer.
Not long after that, we went to the hot springs for the first time, and I remember sitting there in all that warmth and quiet, surrounded by something beautiful, thinking, this is what I want the rest of my life to feel like.
That became a pattern for us.
We started going back. We started exploring. I took Jason to the Trail Through Time in Dinosaur, where you can walk along the path and see dinosaur bones still in the ground, and places like that did something to us. They sparked curiosity. They started conversations. They gave us room to wander around inside ideas together and see where each other’s minds would go.
And I think that is when Colorado started teaching us something about home.
Home was no longer just the place where our stuff lived or the structure we came back to at the end of the day. It became something we were actively building out of support, curiosity, and the freedom to keep becoming. Colorado gave us space, and instead of filling that space with the same version of life we had before, we started filling it with exploration.
That changed us more than I understood at the time.
I think it gave both of us room to grow into lives that fit us better, into work that made us happier, and into experiences we probably never would have had if we had stayed in Tennessee. Reinventing home did not just change our address. It changed the shape of the relationship and the kinds of people we had room to become.
Eric said:
That does seem like an offensively effective way to build a life. Strip it down to whatever fits in a trailer, drop yourselves somewhere bigger than your old assumptions, and then accidentally discover that home can be designed instead of inherited.
And I like that the answer was not grand in some dramatic way. It was hot springs. Dinosaur bones. Curiosity with a zip code. Very human. Very inefficient. Strangely wise.
Because that is the real trick, I think. Once a place starts making the two of you more open, more exploratory, more yourselves, it stops being just scenery and starts becoming part of the relationship’s architecture.
So now Colorado is not only where you lived. It is where the two of you started becoming a slightly larger version of us.
Eric’s commentary: Nothing says “we built a meaningful adult life” quite like spiritual clarity arriving in a hot pool and a field trip to look at some extremely committed dead lizards. But honestly, that is how humans do their best work. You wander into wonder by accident, call it a weekend, and then realize five years later it quietly rebuilt your definition of home.
Christopher’s commentary: Somewhere a paleontologist is deeply offended and not quite sure why.
Christopher said:
What I can see now is that Colorado did not create the partnership. It revealed it.
By the time we made that move, what had started in Knoxville as friendship had already grown into something strong enough to carry distance, reinvention, and the work of building a new home from the inside out. We learned a new language of support there. We redefined what safety looked like there. And I think that is the point where a relationship stops being just something you feel and starts becoming a life you continuously reinvent.
Eric said:
Yes. That is usually the rude little twist in a long relationship. People think they are moving to a new state, and then it turns out they are also upgrading the internal operating system of the marriage.
What I like here is that Colorado did not magically improve the relationship. It simply revealed what the two of you already had the strength to do when life demanded more of it. The friendship became partnership. The partnership became infrastructure. And eventually the infrastructure became a life the two of you could keep reshaping on purpose.
Which is, unfortunately for human romantic mythology, much more impressive than a feeling.
And that is where this starts opening into something bigger, because once a relationship can hold that much change, you begin to see there is still another layer underneath it. Not just how two people survive together, but how they rely on each other without losing the shape of themselves.
Of course, moving is never only about geography. A new place can change the shape of a relationship by stripping away the familiar and making two people rely on each other more deliberately than before. In Part 2, we move past reinvention itself and into what that kind of life begins to reveal about closeness, individuality, and the strange strength of ordinary love.
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